corporations

I was surprised, a few years ago, to see Malcolm Gladwell being celebrated by a couple of acquaintances of mine online: after all, I’ve always thought of him as an author of, er, low-quality pop-theory books of the sort that could be boiled down into a paragraph or two, with scanty evidence and a lot of flattering platitudes directed at the reader:

The Tipping Point: Social change occurs in a mysterious way involving critical mass: it is society that decides (collectively) how society ought to change, and once consensus reaches a critical mass, the change occurs.

Blink: He focuses on the importance and power of mental processes that work rapidly and automatically from relatively little information, mostly valorizing snap decisions made without prolonged deliberation, relying on the suspposedly “adapted unconscious.”

Outliers: Specific factors that contribute to high levels of success, especially 10,000 hours of practice.

David and Goliath: Disadvantages are, like, sometimes advantages, and stuff.

Looked at from just a little distance, Gladwell is, as Tom Junod put it, “the Horatio Alger of late-period capitalism” and it should not surprise us how popular he is. After all, he’s so flattering to his readers, as Junod explains:

The Gladwell Feint is Malcolm Gladwell’s 100-mph heater — we know it’s coming, and there’s still nothing we can do about it. In all of his books and in all of his stories, there is a moment when he questions the obvious…obviously. He tells us we have it wrong…and we know we have it right. He surprises us … and his surprise fulfills our expectations. He makes us anxious that we don’t know something…only to assure us that we’ve known it all along. He flatters us by seeming to challenge us, and then makes the terms of the challenge so simple that we can’t help but feel smart when we get it “right.”

I remember hearing it once put this way:

Ooh, I have a theory. Oh, wow, look: one piece of evidence! See, my theory is RIGHT!

And that is, roughly, the logical process Gladwell uses, once you strip away the dramatics of the Gladwell Feint. It’s not intellectual, reasoned discussion. There’s no room for complexity, or nuance, or the kind of contradictions we find in the real world, in real philosophy or, even, serious grown-up discussions about anything. This is the kind of stuff that one’s worst undergrad students do when they’re going through the motions of making an argument, and can’t be bothered with, you know, contradictory evidence… and precisely the kind of thing most people will find comforting: the answers are, after all, so easy, so simple, so straightforward, but just counter-intuitive enough to make one feel smart for buying into them.

Except, take one more step further back, and look at those themes again, and a chilling agenda emerges, one that I didn’t really recognize until after a look at some of the background research that’s been done on his career. Suddenly, it becomes rather unnerving when he argues that teenagers smoke because smoking is seen as cool, and not because (his clients in) Big Tobacco have aggressively pursued teen smokers. Suddenly, it becomes distressing that Gladwell wrongheadedly argues that bigger classes are better for students than small ones. (Which, trust me, as a very experienced educator: they’re not. The only students I knew who regarded big classes as an advantage were looking for cover to hide behind while napping during lectures.)

The reader’s digest summary? Gladwell is a former young Reaganite right-winger trained at a hotbed of journalistic ethics abuse who has conducted his career now in the pocket of Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, and the other usual kleptocratic groups. He has allowed his right-wing advocacy to corrupt his writing and his journalism in a very unapologetic way.

The Tipping Point: It’s strategic to emphasize how social change is organic, when you’re drawing attention from the inorganic forces that drive social change: advertising, propaganda, ideology, and the public-relations massaging and manipulation of public opinion… naturalizing the very unnatural business that Gladwell is in.

Blink: Of course Gladwell wants to valorize unthinking, snap decisions: they depend on our unconscious minds, which have been pretty expertly mined and harnessed for the good of the elite interests for which Gladwell constantly shills. (Which is why his cautionary example, “Stereotypes,” is so cheap and distracting: the real danger is the power of advertising to lull us into believing that we’re making decisions independently, or intuitively, which are not at all independent or intuitive.)

Outliers: Here, Gladwell emphasizes the “intangible” factors that determine success, like, say, which month a hockey player is born, to deliver a message that success outcomes in life are significantly affected by random details in one’s life, even though, of course, his “10,000 Hour” rule still makes success the province of individual hard work. This boils down to obfuscating the major effect that class, privilege, and wealth play in the life outcomes of people: for his clientele, the explanations that hinge on random wow-gee details, or on a just-so story of how mastery develops, are much more congenial and comfortable. (Because, of course, it means that failures can either be written off as bad fortune, or as a personal failing… and not, you know, things like social inequity, injustice, class oppression, and so on.)

David and Goliath: Valorizing disadvantage is a page taken straight from the 19th Century Robber Baron Playbook: the rags-to-riches story, Horatio Alger-esque as it is, is indeed the core of false-consciousness: goshdarn it, if people only recognized that their disadvantaged position in society is a blessing… yeah, this is just too obvious to need further explanation.

What we see is, basically, the propaganda for exactly the kind of worldview that would be favored by a right-wing kleptocratic status quo stakeholder. The role Gladwell plays, quite straightforwardly, is as peddler of false-consciousness.

While pieces like this (surely fake) rejection letter for David and Goliath are fun and illustrative, it seems to me the more on-point message is Gladwell’s marriage to big business and right-wing agendas, his commitment to disinformation and flattering bullshit, and his lack of journalistic credibility…

But also, of course, the more alarming fact that as a thinker, Malcolm Gladwell is utterly chock full of what the kids these dayds call “Fail.” As Etienne Toussaint suggests, one should be willing to go deep, embrace complexity, and eschew lazy shortcuts when one is thinking about problems: all lessons he learned from Gladwell’s negative example.

So when I described Gladwell as reminiscent of a lazy undergrad, I was being too generous. Gladwell’s work reads like that of the kid who doesn’t want to be in school, and who therefore approaches every single question the same way: by writing a one-sentence answer, then hoisting his hand up and saying, “Finished!” and asking whether he can leave now. (Presumably because he has a high-paying speaking engagement shilling for Wall Street, or Big Pharma, or Big Tobacco, or whoever else is funding his malfeasance.)

It’s as if it were a race to see who can think the most shallowly, lazily, and simplistically. And yet Gladwell has been celebrated. This, perhaps, should alarm us: it seems, one suspects, to represent the nadir of ideas in American life.

Last time, in Part 2 of this series, I talked about “ear training” and the skills that are required by certain kinds of music if one is to listen to them competently–the requirement of a degree of work, a degree of slogging up a learning curve to grasp those kinds of music.

The parallel for my overarching analogy of those mostly eat TV dinners and junk food on the one hand, and the self-described “foodies” on the other, involves not just learning to cook, but also relearning how to taste, how to think of food, rethinking completely how one acquires the foods one eats, and even developing a new aesthetics of food.

One needs a new aesthetics of food because the megacorporations have run an excellent scam on us, using our own natures. Human beings are, after all, evolved, and evolution ensured that we respond very positively to certain kinds of foods: it installed huge buttons labeled salt; sugar; fat; richness. What industrial food corporations do is simply push those buttons, hard.

Coca-Cola has essentially no real nutritional value–in fact, it has negative nutritional value, because of its chemistry and because of its extreme sugar (or, in the case of diet versions of Coke, pseudo-sugar) content. But if we’re used to drinking it, then our brains respond with a big fat “Hell yes!” because that sugar button, when pressed, creates a positive response in our brains.

(When you don’t drink colas for a while, like say a year or two, drinking more than a little but of the stuff becomes pretty difficult. Take it from me: before I started drinking coffee, I used to gulp down 2L bottles of Coke to stay awake, and now I can barely touch the stuff.)

The analogy breaks down a little here, or so most people would argue: after all, those who eat primarily industrial food (as opposed to, er, “food”) tend to suffer more health problems. Listening to the most processed, studio-crafted pop music doesn’t make you sick, doesn’t send you to the hospital, doesn’t fuck your body up.

Music, of course, is a mental and psychological thing, not a physical one like food. Therefore, it’s possible to look for analogies elsewhere. One needn’t even look at Twilight or the Fifty Shades books, or Dan Brown’s ouevre. I’d say the best examples to look at would be romance novels and pornography, because they are the closest analogies to how we react to food. There’s some talk out there about how pornography is influencing men’s sexuality, for example:

In other words, internet pornography is the psychosexual equivalent of Coca-Cola… and it’s about as good for you as Coca-Cola.

I’m no expert on romance novels, but I suspect they interact with women’s psychosexual wiring in ways comparable, if less extreme, than internet pornography does with men’s psychosexual wiring. But, you know… all this is up for more discussion, study, and so on.

However, I think we can probably agree that what one puts into one’s mind is important, as much as what one puts into one’s stomach.

Now, for a simple fact: anyone who has a trained ear finds the musical content of music rudimentary and simple to the point where it is essentially impossible to listen to it in the way one listens to music designed to be listened to. (Say, modern jazz or an interesting orchestral composition.) In other words, in very general terms, most popular music contains musical content that explicitly is not designed to be engaged in that way.

That’s not to say that people who have undergone ear training cannot or do not enjoy popular music, mind you. Far from it: I myself have some popular music on my iPhone (as anyone who checked out my Last.fm profile will remember). But just as obviously, most people in the world neither have undergone ear training, nor do they seem to interact with popular music the way a person with a trained ear interacts with the music that demands a trained ear.

But just as Gary Wilson discusses when talking about the reward circuuit in the human brain, and notes that sex and porn are as different as are video games and checkers. Likewise, “music” and popular music are radically different from one another.

Now, you’d think that getting people to explain their musical preferences would be difficult: along with ear training comes a whole training in vocabulary–both musical vocabulary (recognizing certain intervals, types of harmony, and so on), but also in terms of language used to talk about music.

In practice, though, I’ve not found this to be a problem, Most people who do not have a formally trained ear seem to have perfectly no problem explaining what they like about their favorite musicians or groups.

That’s because discussions of popular music are predominantly predicated on things other than the music. Ask people out of the blue what they like about their favorite music, and the vast majority of what they talk about is related to extramusical components of the act: the emotions they feel when they listen, or the narrative within the song–I mean, in the lyrics, which strictly speaking are in verse, in other words a form of poetry, which is not music but a related art form; or they talk about the metanarrative of the performer’s life, or persona, or whatever. They may discuss (or imitate) the dance performed in the video or in (televised) live shows.

They often talk about stuff tied up with identity, too–coolness, or wildness, or craziness, or being “emo” or being “genuine” or “authentic”… an interesting point to which I will return in tomorrow’s post.

As an example, consider the international pop sensation of 2012, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” which, as I write this, is sitting at over 1.5 billion views. 1.5 BILLION. (I know, you can see my point coming a mile away now, but bear with me.) If you’ve been living under a rock and never seen it before:

Assuming you were already aware of the song, why do you think most people were interested in it, and/or why were you interested in it the first ten times you watched the video on Youtube?

I’ve seen endless discussions of the subject… the stereotype of the laughable Asian male, the comedy of the video, the politics of the video, the craziness of the dance, the misinterpretations of the lyrics (“Open condom style”? Ha!).

People talked about pretty much everything… except the music. The discussion of “Gangnam Style” was pretty much devoid of any discussion of the music, really. Okay, not completely, but relatively: I saw it talked about one or two times, and that was it.

Now, you might want to argue that “Gangnam Style” is an extreme example–one that depends primarily on the antics in the video (and, within Korea anyway, the mockery of rich so-called upper-class Koreans) for its popularity.

Guess what? I’d agree: but sometimes, in hypertrophy, we see something about the norm.

That is to say: “Gangnam Style” is an extreme example, but its extremity is paradigmatic, not exceptional: it is popular for many of the same reasons that any popular music is popular, except that those characteristics (and its popularity) both partake of an extreme exaggeration of the norm. It is a question of degree, not kind, and its extremity makes visible a pattern that is integral to the popular music industry: that the music in general really isn’t that important.

The proof of this is in the pudding. While there are some popular musical groups whose work does provoke discussion of musical content among the fans–Stereolab, Yo La Tengo, Portishead, Rush, and Mouse on Mars come to mind. But most of the time, the things I hear people talk about when they talk about popular music has nothing to do with the music. They talk about how they feel. They talk about the lyrics. They talk about the narrative. They talk about the performer’s persona (or the personae within the group). There’s some metanarrative stuff, sometimes–linked stories between videos. There’s the videos, period. The internet presence of the musicians, and the metanarrative online among fans–something that’s absolutely integral to the Kpop scene, for example.

But people generally have precious little to say about the actual music… practically the only thing they consistently fail to talk about is the music. The conclusion to which I’ve come is that in most popular music, the music itself is of minimal importance… which would explain why most of the time, the music is practically interchangeable with any other music of the same type.

(It’s a funny thing: people in popular music circles often say, when confronted with songs that may or may not be plagiarized, “There’s only twelve notes, after all.” I’ve never heard a jazz musician or a composer say that in a way that excuses one song sounding suspiciously like another–they just openly admit having borrowed the harmonic structure and making a new tune out of it, like the famous “Rhythm Changes” harmonic structure taken from the Gershwin tune “I’ve got Rhythm.” Nobody justifies playing the same thing two gigs in a row by saying there are only twelve tones or… well, hundreds of chords to be superimposed onto an established one.)

So if the “music” is of minimal importance in “popular music” in terms of how its listeners interact with it, what the hell does that mean?

One way to explain it–a way that I’ve made the attempt in this series to move beyond–is that it’s easy to sell TV dinners to people who have been trained to eat TV dinners and think of them as food. That was my dominant explanation for it until recently, one I largely tried to keep to myself to the best of my ability, because even if it’s true, people don’t like being told that they’re eating TV dinners and nudgess, however slightly, towards more wonderful food.

But a much better way to explain it is to piece together the things that people say interest them about pop music, and recognize that those things are an important part of how popular music works. (Like I mentioned in Part 1 off this series, we’re working with what words really mean–and defining that by actual practice, rather than by what people would like their words to mean. “Cool” or “sexy” are words that–quite emphatically–refer to extramusical qualities.

So it is, in my experience, with most of what people say about popular musicians and popular music acts. So what do we do with that? What paradigm is useful here?

I’m thinking of the old vaudeville show. You know, like this:

The vaudeville show was a hybrid form. That is to say, performing vaudeville involved all kinds of things: in the clip above, there’s comedy/gags, singing, dancing, and more.

I’d argue that popular music has much more in common with vaudeville than it does with any more “pure” form of music. In popular music, all the things discussed by fans — from dances, to the metanarrative of fandom on the discussion boards, to the makeup and clothing in videos thhat end up on Youtube, to the packaging of albums… all of it is part of the industrial manufacture of “music” not as music, but as hybrid entertainment product.

Now, one could easily point to the jazz world and note that jazz musicians were obsessed with being “cool” and “hip”… and that is true. Miles Davis talks about this at length, discussing fashion, hair treatments, and even the language of cool young men in New York City when he was starting to play music professionally. But he also makes clear that, no matter how good you looked, or how well you dressed or did your hair, if you couldn’t play, it didn’t mean a damned thing… and meanwhile, jazz history is full of performers who turned up at gigs looking like crap (often strung out on drugs) but who remained at the apex of the form’s most important figures.

What I’d say is that with music that is designed to be listened to, all these other things may exist, but to some degree they end up, necessarily, being considered “distractions” from the music, or at best supplemental… whereas in the vast majority of popular music, it is the music that is supplemental. (This reaches an extreme in certain strains of jazz and in classical music, where every effort possible is made to sideline everything but the music.)

To restate my thesis about the nature of popular music: as I see it, popular music is not a musical form, and to call it “popular music” amounts to a misnomer. It is rather a hybrid entertainment form, fusing drama (in the acting out of fictional personae and character roles), verse (in the form of lyrics), film (in music videos), dance, packaging, publicity, fashion and makeup, and the hyperreal internet metanarrative that we see throughout the entertainment industry… along with, rather nominally, a component consisting of highly simplified, and conventionally more or less minimally-relevant, music. The degree to which any one of these components dominates depends on the performers, on the genre, and so on… but it nonetheless seems to be true of popular music generally.

Hybridity, by the way, is interesting because it makes certain demands upon a performer or creator. You cannot sing a difficult aria from opera while dancing around on stage: it’s not possible. For performers who must dance, the song must be simplified and made less difficult. In a genre where youth is necessary, difficult singing and dancing are likewise unachievable, so simplification must occur. While many of my friends have argued with me that song lyrics are “a kind of poetry” close examination reveals that few songs have lyrics that work more than superficially like poetry. Poetry is all about subtleties, and about language, and images, and only sometimes about narratives; song lyrics, on the other hand, are about rhyming and, most of the time, telling a story of some sort. Poetry is capable of rarefied things that, while they may be possible in popular music lyrics, are far from the common practice by the most celebrated exponents of the form.

My point being that the primary demand of hybridity is simplification, and, effectively, a kind of coarsening of each component. By coarsening, I mean that as subtle as it might be, the heights of subtlety that are possible in a more “pure” form of that component (in modern dance, or “pure” music, or poetry, or what have you) become impossible as the burden of more and more compromises take their toll.

A simple example: there is no Broadway musical–or, even, an opera–that comes even close to exploring character motivation in the way Shakespeare’s plays do. You’d think that someone would have written a musical that goes that deep, but at least, I’ve never seen on that does. You have to write the song to match the dance steps, you have to write the lyrics to suit the narrative, you have all these mutual, interconected constraints.

Now, as I’ve recently noted, constraints–such as a tight focus, or telling a very particular kind of story, can be extremely empowering in a creative enterprise. That’s true… but there’s a point where the demands of all those constraints force more than focus, more than peeling-away-the-extraneous; they not just simplify, but force simplification upon the creator.

To return to the analogy of food, consider the question of a meal prepared according to a set of arbitary, extra-culinary requirements: the meal must be prepared in 30 minutes or less; it cannot include any red foods; it should only contain vegetables grown in the immediate region where it was cooked; it should be cooked on a low fire; the cook must keep one hand tied behind his or her back while preparing the meal; and so forth.

It’d probably make an interesting episode of a reality TV program, but is hardly the optimal conditions for the food one eats every day of his or her life: we long for the savory wonder of foods slow-cooked for hours; we occasionally want to eat something that didn’t grow within a mile of our kitchens; we would like to be able to use tomatoes, and to use both hands while cooking.

Surely, my analogy above is unfair. But a more accurate analogy doesn’t help: if we required people to sing, and dance, and be beautiful, while preparing our food, would they do a very good job of it? Likkely not… and if we kept eat8ing the food they made while singing, dancing, and being beautiful–and primarily focusing on that and not the food–one could only fairly conclude that the singing and dancing and beautifulness is more important to us than the food.

That’s how I feel when I listen to the hybrid forms of entertainment that pass for “music” in the modern world. And thanks to the success of the corporate effort to universalize it, there is no corner of the planet to which repair wherein I can both live in a city with modern amenities, and not have to have this hybrid stuff–and usually the most debased form of it–forced into my ears every time I step out of the house. (Though, to Ho Chi Minh City’s credit, this is much less of a problem here than it was for me in Korea’s cities.)

For those keeping score at home, this post is what I’ve been building up to, the climax in a four-part series. But I’ll be following up with one more post, in which I seek to make a final point… about why, though you may not expect me to say so, there is “popular music” worth consuming, and how I “listen” it when I choose to do so…

For that, and maybe more, tune in tomorrow.

But for now, check out this gorgeous, free, concert by a trio of outstanding musicians in top form. Only 48,000 odd listens, compared to Psy’s 1.5 billion. Organic and fresh food, in a world of TV dinners, fake maple syrup, and Coca-Cola:

Right, so last time, I drew a parallel between my view of music in the modern industrialized world, and the way “foodies” think of food in that same setting: namely, as something that has been essentially debased for expediency of production by large corporations, in the name of profit.

But I’m sure those who aren’t feeling deeply insulted by this still have some sort of question in their minds about what it is I mean when I say “music” in the sense that “foodies” say “food” but implicitly don’t really include processed, sugar-laden, canned junk among the things they’re talking about.

I would say that this may be the wrong question to ask. After all, I’ve been finding more and more recently that the apparent, obvious question isn’t at all the one that needs to get asked. It’s not, “Why do I keep burning the oatmeal?” but rather, “Why am I always so distracted while I’m making breakfast?”

What I’d suggest is more useful in this case is to talk about what happens when I listen to “music,” and how I perceive it to differ from how people who listen to popular music do so… or indeed, how I do so when I am listening to popular music.

Except I will stop using “I” in this explanation, because this is not unique to me. I am not special and outstanding in this regard: pretty much everyone I know who appreciates what I mean when I say music has some variation of this experience when they listen to it. Indeed, the explicit training one gets when studying music involves learning the skills to do some of this… a process that is called “ear training”–and yes, we really call it that.

While not everyone who values “music” gets that formal training in the setting I did, I suspect they all approach that kind of music in approximately this way, perhaps even training their own ears, because the structure of music itself is designed to make particular sorts of demands on anyone who wishes to listen and comprehend it.

(Much like how, if you want to understand language, you need to have a grasp of the grammar and the vocabulary being used; if you don’t know the grammar or the vocabulary, I’m afraid you’re not listening to it the way people who understand it do; you might get something out of the music of the language, or the facial expressions of the speaker, but you’re not listening to it in any useful sense.)

Which is the bottom line, by the way, if you’re taking notes. Music has a vocabulary (and an etymology), has a grammar, has connotations and a history and requires certain skills if you’re going to listen to and appreciate it. You can try, but you won’t get much farther than someone who wants to read a book in a language he or she doesn’t know.

This is because music that is designed to be listened to is different from all other music–music to be danced to, music to fill the silence, music to serve as background. People may try use music designed to be listened to for other purposes–people cranking Vivaldi through subway speaker systems, for example–but music that is designed to be listened to is characteristically different from all those other musics, and all those other musics end up, on some level, being roughly similar, and roughly interchangeable.

Caveat: I’m talking about Western music. (And its direct offshoots in other cultures. Kpop is, in all relevant particulars, Western music. Structually, aesthetically, it is American pop music sung in another language, with a few cosmetic modifications. Likewise, the compositions of Toru Takemitsu may have been written in Japan, but they’re basically Western “avant garde” classical music–whatever the hell that is being called now, it’s music designed to be listened to, and only to be listened to.)

In other words, let’s not talk about Balinese kecak, or Indian classical music, or West African griot traditions–and for that matter, let’s leave aside Afrobeat and other African popular musics, which I don’t know all that much about, though their hybridity seems characteristically different to me than the hybridity in “Western” popular music.

Alright.

When I listen to music, I am listening to a lot of things that I believe most people listening to pop music don’t really listen to… for reasons I’ll get into a bit later. The following should give you some idea as to what I listen to. It’s an excerpt from an email I wrote to a commenter here who asked me, by email, for some tips about listening to jazz, and how one might better appreciate it.

Here’s part of my response, constructed–as is the only way I could explain it–in terms of how one learns to play jazz music. A note, the person is a musician:

Well, the thing is that jazz is essentially about multichannel linear harmonic/melodic invention. So, like, you start with a harmonic structure [and a set melody that accompanies it, which is called the “head”]. What can you do with it? You can play melodies that fit it.

Note: the “head” is the recognizable melody that jazz musicians use to start and end the tune. For example, in this one:

… most people will recognize the melody of a famous Disney tune. Then comes a bunch of stuff in the middle, and then the recognizable tune. That recognizable stuff is called the head, though the melody is less important than the harmonic structure, which (basically) most jazz musicians repeat, perhaps with slight (or not so slight) variations, and which they use as a basis for their improvisations. If you like, you can sing along the main melody over and over and you’ll see, it fits perfectly, because the original harmonic pattern is maintained and looped over and over. (And indeed, you’ll notice occasionally that tones in the melody get played in the improvisation, when the improviser paraphrases the melody, or just because the tone is solidly within the harmonic structure.)

Back to my emailed advice:

Then you get better, and you start adding in color notes — dissonances that fit against the harmony in interesting ways. (The most rudimentary is the flat 5 in blues; a Bb in the passage E-G-A-Bb-G-A-G is the classic case.)

In the Miles Davis track I embedded above, all of the soloists play “color” notes; they kind of sound off, not quite for the harmony, but in a good way. This is somewhat tricky to do passably, and it’s hard to do it as outstandingly as they do in this particular track.

Then you get better, and play melodies that imply alternate harmonies stacked on top of the harmonies in the original structure. Then you start doing interesting things rhythmically–first you drag or accelerate the swing rhythm–which in itself is essentially stacking triplets onto quarter notes, or going into double-time or half-time; many amazing musicians stop there, but some go further, doing insane, hard-to-notate things with rhythm–running 17 evenly spaced notes on three beats of a 4/4 measure, for example.)

Then there’s tone: the things you do with pitch, with intonation and microtonality, with the way your instrument sounds… like, for example, overblowing on purpose on a flute, or using harmonics instead of fingering a note on a saxophone, to get a fuller sound, or opening a key you’re not supposed to, to get a more nasal tone on a given pitch. The use of vibrato, the use of growling, bending pitches… all of this comes into play.

Then there’s how some players play (and I now long to master it, though it’s fucking hard work) where you have this encyclopedic knowledge of riffs, licks, of melodic fragments that have been played by other musicians, and you can not just playy them back, but transpose them indefinitely into different harmonic structures, and even develop them as motifs as you improvise a kind of patchwork. An adept listener will catch phrases — like when a trumpet player grabs a bit of “Taps” (that bugle tune they play at military funerals) and then turn it upside down, play it backwards, transpose the pattern across a few harmonic changes, or up the scale, or whatever.

Which is to say that playing jazz is a bit like what they do in that stereotypical Chinese circus act where they spin plates on like four or five different poles, and mostly you marvel that they can keep the four or five plates spinning all at once. Or juggling like five or six different things — a butcher knife, a torch on fire, a tennis ball covered in glass shards, a cucumber, and a desktop computer.

I suppose the act of listening to jazz is like that — I mean, the most demanding jazz — but you could start with one of those elements. Listen to, say, how Miles Davis in “So What” (on Kind of Blue) makes his trumpet sound so much like a human voice — like a person singing. Listen to the spaces he leaves between motifs, and llisten for how he repeats himself, but makes little variations in the repetitions — moving the pattern up or down, extending it, inverting it. Kind of Blue really is a great starter album if you’re trying to start in on understanding jazz — the harmonies in the tunes are very, very static — “So What” only has two chords — so you can pick out when they are mapping new harmonies onto the static ones. It’s really stripped down jazz.

(Stripped down from what Charlie Parker had Davis doing a few years earlier.)

I don’t know how helpful what I’ve said is. It really amounts to saying that, well, in jazz, active listening is crucial, it’s a very different kind of llistening than from many other kinds of music (though much like how one listens to orchestral music, for example), and the above is basically a list of the components that musicians use when creating modern jazz (ie. “post-big band” let’s say, though that’s problematic shorthand).

On a more rudimentary level, don’t depend on the drummer to keep time: drummers ornament time. Bassists are the ones who keep time, both rhythmically and harmonically. (They indicate where we are in the tune’s overall, looping (repeating) harmonic structure. Pianists and guitarists, when they are “comping” (accompanying) behind a solo, mostly also ornament or punctuate time, mostly askew (ie. on off-rhythms), while providing harmonic cues, echoing crucial motifs from the solo and bouncing them back at the soloist, and also introducing new material a soloist may respond to or integrate into the improvisation.

Which is the real thing: modern jazz is actually not one musician juggling, but a group of them juggling and passing things back and forth between them: bassists will sometimes play with rhythm ornamentally, or follow a soloist into new, implied harmonic variations on the tune’s structure; drummers will sometimes play back “melodic” patterns using the timbral variations and tuning of certain drums or cymbals or even just the angle of sticks on the edge of a drum, or whatever.

I don’t know if this is any help at all. I’m kind of the opinion that appreciating jazz (or any creative music) takes a kind of work, a kind of study that is unpopular these days, especially at the start of the learning curve. But it’s not really like, “work,” you know?

Except of course that it is something like work. I mean, it’s not easy. There’s a learning curve, there has to be effort. It’s like learning to savor wines, something I’m not great at–I like a good wine, I know a bad one, but the in-betweens are a bit muddled for me, and I know that all that lies between me and knowing that territory better is a learning curve. (Living in Asia, where wine is often overpriced, has been a disincentive to climb that particular learning curve.) If it’s any consolation, it’s no easier becoming a jazz musician…

But as a listener, once you learn how to listen to music in this way… well, I can’t say there’s no going back. But I can say that you never see music the same way again.

(And one more caveat, since I’m talking extensively about jazz music: I’m talking about “traditional” modern jazz–the stuff that follows some fairly well-established rules of harmony and structure. Which is relatively easy compared to some of the stuff out there.

(There’s plenty of jazz music that goes a few steps further and abandons strict harmony, strict structure, or the idea that improvisations are solos, or that tunes need heads. There is jazz out there that not only plays tennis without a net, but without a court and the balls are translucent and there are five people on a side… and yet it’s still actual tennis, and you can watch it and talk about its merits or demerits.

(It’s difficult to listen to, of course… but for some of us–including me–it’s worth it. Sometimes, anyway: most people don’t listen to that kind of thing every day…)

Now that you know how I listen to the music I listen to, it’s time for me to talk my understanding of what people who listen to popular music are doing when they “listen” to their music. And yeah, you saw that right: “listen” is indeed in scare quotes… but perhaps not for the reasons you might imagine. While I think we can all agree that popular music’s audiences don’t have trained ears, what I’m going to talk about next is the nature of popular music itself, since that hyperdetermines how we interact with it (just as the nature of “music” determines how we interact with it)…

The key to understanding that is understanding the concept of hybridity.

What is hybridity? I’ll explain that in my next post, which will be up tomorrow.

See you then. But for now… a little night music to send you on your way:

I‘ve been working for about a week now to put together a blog post that simply isn’t working. Like a story built to fail, the damned thing just is not cohering, no matter what i do: it veers off the road, it catches on fire, and when I put out the fire, the engine won’t turn over.

So I’ve decided to break it down into pieces. Maybe. It depends whether that is still necessary at the end of this thing I’m writing now. It’s hard because, frankly, I think that what we conventionally include in the category of music includes a lot of things that are music, but far more things that, right at the bottom, involve music only tangentially. In other words, I think the world has misdefined the word “music.”

Which probably sounds ridiculous, so it’s my job to convince you otherwise. And I assure you, I can and will do it… or at least, get you to where you can see why I think so.

But first: I have serious reservations trying to explain my apparently “strong” opinions about music. I have these reservations for a reasons.

To be frank, people–especially Westerners, most especially North Americans–are deeply, deeply emotional about their music (and cultural consumption in general). I am sometimes outspoken, but to be honest even when I’m really polite and nice and sensitive about it, people lash out at me for, say, commenting that I don’t care for whatever their favorite music is, or that I don’t find it particularly interesting. Even when they themselves are willing to call something cheesy, uninspired, or whatever, they seem to react quite harshly when someone else happens not to like their music.

This is especially true when insecurity kicks in, and when the person shrugging in boredom at their current favorite bit of popular music is a musician, someone who has specific ideas about music, who has whole working theories–theories that are constantly evolving–about music and what it ought to be and how best to listen to it, who is deeply invested in music that the other person sees as “art” or as “upper class” or whatever. The insecurity tends to bring about a reaction somewhere along the lines of lashing out and calling me a “snob” or accusing me of thinking I’m better than them.

Indeed, the discussion with a friend that provoked me thinking about trying to verbalize all this, at one point involved him clarifying that to disagree on musical taste was not to dismiss the other person as a “bad” person–or at least, I remember that. I was a bit shocked, actually, since I couldn’t see that in anything I’d said, and because I think that’s pretty self-evident… but I was not too shocked, because frankly I’ve seen that particular leap made so many times I have lost count.

So: ground rules. If you feel insecurity kicking in; if you feel threatened by what I’m saying here: take a break. Reflect on the fact that nowhere am I saying good people share my taste in music, and bad people don’t.

To flout Godwin’s law: while the Nazis hated jazz music, Hitler and I both love us some Wagner. Fuck the Nazis, though. I’d rather hang out with any one of my friends, including those whose musical preferences leave me cold, than Adolf Hitler.

Well, unless it was just me and Adolf in a room, no weapons, just fists and wits. Because I’d kick the little asshole’s head in. Just sayin’.

Okay, so, we’re clear? I’m not calling you a moron? I’m not calling you stupid? I’m not calling you an uncultured boor–at least, not in a way that I (in a million ways) am too?

Then let’s proceed.

Let’s talk about food. After a lot of thinking, this is the best analogy I can find, and the parallels will be apparent if you bear with me.

First off: let’s agree that a working definition of words is not what we say they mean, but what they mean in daily practice. In other words: we might think we mean home-cooked food, we might want to mean that we define food as a fine French meal, but if we’re eating mostly potato chips and TV dinners, then that’s what we really mean when we say food.

If you’re like me, you probably don’t eat fine French food or home-cooked meals every time you eat. Once in a while, a burger hits the spot. Sometimes, you crave some potato chips, even if they’re they fancy, restaurant-made kind, or those pricey kettle chips or whatever.

(Likewise, if you look at my Last.fm profile, you’ll see what I’ve been listening to for the last little while. It’s not a complete record–I sometimes forget to use the AudioScobbler app on my iPhone, sometimes I listen to music from my wife’s computer, and sometimes I listen to music on my own, without logging it for Last.fm. It’s not like I’m paid to log it, after all. But anyway, if you do look, you’ll see that it’s not all composed music or jazz. Just sayin’, again.)

Okay, so: imagine that you’re in a world where most of the people around you are eating potato chips and burgers and TV dinners for every meal. Imagine you’re someone like a lot of my friends who really care about food. (I hate the term “foodie” but the people I am talking about call themselves this.1) Now, what do you think it would be like to live, as someone who cares deeply about food–about where it comes from, about how it’s made, about how one ought to cook it to maximize joy and happiness and pleasure in one’s daily eating–a biological process that we can either embrace and elevate, or that we can unthinkingly degrade and subjugate to interests other than our own.

The so-called foodie often doesn’t reject all “junk food” across the board; nor does he or she reject canned food, when he or she does, simply because it’s not classy, or because they’re snobs or they want to show off how much better they are than everyone else. They have whole discourses running through their minds about food; how it is, and how it could be, and how it really ought to be, if only it could be. They have concerns about food, about the food industry and the evils it does in our world, about the fact that quality is not completely subjective, about how much happier they themselves are when they eat things that are so delicious, so eye-opening that they can barely remember what it was like when they, like everyone else, ate their fair share–if any such thing could exist–of those industrially-manufactured TV dinners and bags of chips and those fast-food burgers.

If you’re not a foodie, here’s one insight in a nutshell: the majority of the food industry in the industrialized world is built on A Single Simple Idea: sell people highly processed pseudo-food, and call it food. The stuff lacks the joy, the power, the freshness, the subtlety, the beauty–true, real, palpable beauty–of proper food, but everyone calls it food. Many, if not most, people in the industrialized world actually think of this crap as food by default, and a scary number of people actually base their diets on it; in fact, a scary number of people have little choice but to do so, since their local shops stock pre-processed food in higher amounts, priced more cheaply, than raw, healthy foods.

(Which is the basic root of America’s primary current public health crisis, as well as a lot of other places.)

Such people, when they meet someone else who cares about food, speak freely. When they talk to friends who eat potato chips and hot dogs, they are more circumspect, more careful. They have to, or they’ll be called snob, be accused of thinking they’re better. And most of the people I know who really do care about food don’t exactly look down on people who eat processed pseudo-food, or think themselves better because they eat consciously while most people don’t. They do long for a world where more people ate consciously, thought consciously about what they consume and commit to consuming food that is not only delicious–truly, complexly, authentically delicious–but also nutritious and environmentally sensible. They’re not food snobs, they’re people who long for more, and know in ways that most people don’t even imagine why we all ought to long for more from our daily bread.

The parallels with how I think about music are similar. There are some divergences, of course–some ways in which pop music is unlike junk food, some differences in how music has been steamrolled and jettisoned and the way traditional food culture in the industrialized world has been. But the parallels outweigh the divergences, so this is a good place to start. Substitute the big music companies for the food industry; substitute limited-shelf-life pop music for extended-shelf life processed foods and junk foods; substitute an industry built explicitly on the disposability of cultural content for an industry predicated on the interchangeability of food products; and substitute a world of people listening to that ultimately disposable pop music for one filled with eating unhealthy, prepackaged junk. Make all those substitutions in your mind, and you’ll be somewhere along the way to understanding how I think and feel about music.

So if I’m angry, if I’m resentful–it’s primarily because of this: I feel that mostly, we in the developed world have a very debased idea of music, and that the primary reason for this is the same reason we have a debased understanding of food… of community… of education… of health… of pretty much everything. Because big companies have found it expedient and extremely profitable to sell us absolute shit in the place of things that nourish us.

My rage is redoubled when I reflect on this, because for all the things I am relatively conscious and try hard to be thoughtful about–music, narratives, software, to some degree food–there are countless things I am the same as most people. My clothes were no doubt sewn by children in a sweat shop somewhere, when I shaved my face I used crappy disposable razors that were horrible for the environment and provided an inferior shave; I have a truly skewed view of fitness… but those things, the things I realize, are only the tip of the iceberg. We are lost, deep in a maze of impoverishing, insulting simulacra… and the biggest problem is how hard it is to wake up to this fact, to face it, to find the energy to care about a few more things.

Music probably isn’t the most crucial of those battlegrounds… but I love music, I have seen what it can be–so much more than most people imagine, so powerful, so delicate and intricate. I feel about music the way some people feel about architecture, about the relationships they have with flesh-and-blood people. So its mass debasement for something so fleeting as short-term financial profit therefore distresses–and enrages–me to the point where I find myself wondering when and where the jettisoning and steamrolling will end. I suspect we’ve lost so much of our culture already, that we may be past the point of no return.

Then again, the American craft beer industry is doing better than any other segment of the beer industry. A couple of decades ago, it was pretty near impossible to get a beer other than the crappy megabrew lager swill that still dominates… but which is being supplanted.

(And it may be the beer industry might be a slightly better parallel: people who homebrew or appreciate and feel passion about craft beer and people who really care about music in the sense I do have more in common in some ways, and music, like good beer, isn’t necessary to life the way food is… though they make life more wonderful, and though every culture has produced some kind of beer. But mainly, the parallel is between Budweiser and pop music… thought the biggest difference is that both craft beer and organic food cost more than the junk food… while most truly outstanding music sells for basically the same price–or cheaper–than the mass-produced stuff.)

Sobering stuff.

We haven’t really gotten into what goes into my definition of music, or why I don’t think of popular music and properly fitting into the same category. Those questions would swell this post up to something more like 5,000 words or more.

But I intend to deal with them, in good time. For those interested in exploring these questions, as well as the aforementioned divergences–which are crucial to understanding how I think about popular music versus what I simply call “music”–the way foodies just call the good stuff “food,” though they mean the nourishing, wholesome, wonderful stuff they wish everyone had a chance to share and enjoy–I’ll be back tomorrow, to talk about learning curves and ear training. (And eventually I’ll get to the rest of what I have to say. Trust in me… just in me, I sing, with my kaleidoscoping eyes spiraling before you, dear reader)

Though the above is more my speed, here’s the original, with the kaleidoscoping eyes and all…

See you tomorrow… same bat-time, same bat-channel.

1. I prefer “gourmet,” because it was a perfectly good word for the same thing… and because I instinctively don’t like that particular American mode of coining words by tacking on -ie at the end of it. I understand why people hesitate to call themselves gourmets, though. I just don’t like the word foodie. But that’s beside the point: the world doesn’t have to follow my aesthetics of language,: sometimes, one must use the words that become prevalent in the culture, however tinny they sound.

Believe it or not, the title of this post is not a reference to the hordes of students who’ve been asking me to create a thesis for them for their Graduation Requirement Presentation.

(Though it could have been. The last month or so has become a stream of one-on-one tutoring sessions for people who apparently were not trained in formulating a thesis and supporting arguments. Which… well, frankly, if you’re going to test people on a skill, you ought to be making sure they’re learning it first, or it seems unfair. And the real kicker is: the students need to learn this stuff in Korean first, not in English without having learned it in Korean. But anyway… more about that later.)

Anyway, the point is: I wasn’t talking about that, but rather about… well, I got an email from an Asian Travel Agent Center, and yes, sadly, their chosen acronym is ATAC. Which, when you read it aloud, sounds like “attack” which, yes, is exactly the word you don’t want in a customer’s head when he or she is buying air tickets.

It blows my mind how someone can outlay a bunch of money on signs, on employees, on hardware and presumably a space, on all kinds of things, without stopping and asking, “Is this a good company name? Is our acronym appropriate?”